Joint interview with Prof. John Mearsheimer on the Trump-Putin energy deal, Ukraine war, Yemen-Saudi Arabia conflict and more, hosted by Tom Switzer:

Live interview with The Ditch, recorded in Dublin on September 30:

Clip from Oct. 12 appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Ukraine and Iran:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hoped that this summer’s “40-Day Influence Campaign”, a wave of missile and drone attacks targeting Russia’s energy sites, would spark enough unrest to force Moscow into ending the war. By inflicting fresh pain on a rival nuclear power, it would also showcase Kyiv’s utility to its chief sponsor in Washington.

Instead, Zelensky triggered a more punishing Russian missile campaign that his depleted military has been unable to stop. Now comes a second blow.

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In May 2014, weeks after welcoming the ouster of Ukraine’s democratically elected president in the Maidan uprising, one of Washington’s most influential policymakers confidently predicted that a similar fate awaited Moscow.

“Unless Putin changes course, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the current nationalistic fever will break in Russia,” Victoria Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

When it does, it will give way to a sweaty and harsh realization of the economic costs. Then, if they are free enough to think for themselves, Russia’s citizens will ask: What have we really achieved? Instead of funding schools, hospitals, science and prosperity at home in Russia, we have squandered our national wealth on adventurism, interventionism and the ambitions of a leader who cares more about empire than his own citizens.

For Nuland and allied war hawks, interventionism in Ukraine was the primary means to impose costs on Russia. By helping to install a pro-NATO government and encouraging a civil war with Russia-aligned Ukrainians in the Donbas, Washington drew Moscow into a protracted conflict that culminated in the February 2022 invasion. On the day the “special military operation” began, President Biden reiterated the goal laid out by Nuland. Imposing financial pain, Biden said, will ensure that “the people of Russia know what he [Putin] has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”

As the full-scale phase of the Russia-Ukraine war approaches its fifth anniversary, it is safe to declare that the Biden-Nuland gambit has failed.

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Twenty-five years ago this week, Benjamin Netanyahu infamously described the 9/11 attacks as “very good” for US-Israeli relations. Netanyahu recognized that the one-day calamity would be exploited for a long-term project. As a recent article in Foreign Affairs notes, the “primary goal” of US policy in the Middle East for decades “has been to lock its disparate allies into an order built around protecting Israel.” To that end, the Bush administration quickly drew up a plan to topple seven disobedient countries, starting with Iraq and culminating in Iran, as Gen. Wesley Clark recounted. The principal targets shared the distinction of being bastions of support for Palestinian self-determination and bitter foes of Israeli military occupation. Netanyahu would go on to use the century’s other major day of infamy, October 7th, for the same agenda.

Every major conflict in the Middle East, now caught in a new cycle of turmoil, can be traced back to the US-Israeli pursuit of their post-9/11 order.

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After just a few days, the spin around CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Russia is already contradicting itself. The initial claim was that the U.S. spy chief made the trip to warn the Kremlin against attacking a NATO state. According to the Wall Street Journal, American officials are worried that Vladimir Putin, “squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion.” One day later, a story planted in the New York Times dramatically changed the narrative: Ratcliffe was not there to issue a warning, but to offer friendly, urgent advice. Worried that Vladimir Putin is not receiving “honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll,” the CIA director made the trek to “share his bleak assessment of the state of the Russian war against Ukraine, and to urge the Russians to cut a deal.”

The idea of the world’s most powerful intelligence official boarding a C-17A military transport aircraft to make a transatlantic bid for peace in Ukraine is a nice thought. It is also highly implausible.

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Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who rose to fame as a star witness in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, has become the latest neoconservative candidate to lose a Democratic primary. In a major upset, Vindman was defeated Tuesday by State Representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist and Medicare-for-All advocate, in the race for Florida’s Democratic Senate nomination. He lost despite national name recognition and a 16-to-one fundraising advantage. Whereas Vindman spent $2 million on ads, Nixon spent less than $60,000.

Nixon, one of only two state lawmakers to call for a ceasefire in Gaza after Israel began its post-October 7^th mass murder spree, ran a spirited grassroots campaign that tapped into her experience as a union organizer. By contrast, Vindman, a staunch supporter of Israel, wrote her off and treated his victory as a foregone conclusion. He refused to debate Nixon and rarely mentioned her by name. According to one veteran political consultant, Vindman “literally laughed at Angie Nixon” and “didn’t even think he was in a primary.” In one of his campaign’s few acknowledgments of his opponent, Vindman’s wife mocked Nixon on social media for failing to wear “professional clothes” — a jab for which she was forced to apologize.

After the recent defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman in New York, Vindman is now the second major figure from Ukrainegate, the scandal behind Trump’s first impeachment, to lose a Democratic primary. Vindman triggered the controversy by reporting concerns about the infamous July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, was outraged because Trump had paused a weapons shipment to Kyiv while pressuring its government to assist with his political grievances, primarily getting to the bottom of the effort to frame his presidency as a Russian operation.

Vindman supported the policy of arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas rather than using Washington’s post-Maidan leverage to end the fight. The impeachment scandal that he generated cemented this agenda to an unprecedented degree. While Democrats presented their case as a valiant defense of the U.S. democratic process, the underlying message was at stark odds with any such principle. According to Vindman and other impeachment witnesses, American foreign policy was no longer the purview of an elected president, but of unelected bureaucrats. As House Democrats put it, Trump, by freezing the weapons shipment, had acted “against the interests of U.S. national security, and over the objections of these career experts.”

The possibility that an elected president could overrule “career experts” was particularly vexing to star witness Vindman. “I knew the president had clear and straightforward talking points—I’d written them,” he recounted in his memoir of the Trump-Zelensky call. “He was to congratulate Zelensky, show support for Ukraine’s reform and anti-corruption agenda, and urge caution regarding the Russians.” But the insubordinate president, Vindman complained, “wasn’t using my talking points at all.” Ignoring Vindman’s holy writ wasn’t the president’s only transgression. His heretical pause on the Ukraine military package “was baffling. Not only was it a 180-degree turn from the stated policy the entire U.S. government supported, but it was also contrary to U.S. national-security interests in the region.” When it came to “official Ukraine policy,” Vindman added, there was “broad consensus in the diplomatic and military parts of the administration. What exactly, we wondered, was the president doing?”

It did not occur to Vindman and his fawning media cheerleaders, particularly on MSNBC, to ask the inverse question: in deciding that national security mandarins could overrule an elected president, what were they doing? Many Democratic and Republican lawmakers surely shared Vindman’s objections, and his view of Ukraine as “a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” Yet under the longstanding norms of U.S. democracy, setting “official Ukraine policy” is the commander-in-chief’s prerogative. The Constitution, it turns out, contains no exception for executive policies that contradict the “broad consensus” of unelected subordinates.

In articles for The Nation at the time, I warned that “the Cold War mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace.” On the latter front, by cementing a bipartisan consensus to arm Ukraine rather than encourage it to make peace with Russia, Ukrainegate paved the way for Russia’s invasion of February 2022, and all of its catastrophic consequences. When it comes to Democrats’ political fortunes, Trump is now in his second term. Vindman was elevated to Democratic stardom in an era when Cold War dogma was treated as the anti-Trump party line. He has now become the latest establishment stalwart to learn that Democratic voters want to resist the Republican agenda with policies that center humanity, not the bipartisan militarism of “career experts.”

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Four months into President Donald Trump’s first stint in office, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation of him as a suspected asset of the Russian government. At the direction of then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the FBI sought to determine if Trump “was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation,” and accordingly posed “threats to the national security of the United States.”

The predicate for this unprecedented probe of a sitting president as the agent of a foreign power has been kept from the public ever since. When I obtained the first public release of its opening document in late 2024, just weeks before Trump’s second term, the FBI redacted the entire “articulable factual basis.” After more than nine years of secrecy, a new declassification by the Trump White House confirms that the investigation, codenamed “Oxferd Comma” [sic] and launched on May 16, 2017, was not driven by any secret information tying Trump to Russia. It was instead based on the FBI leadership’s maximalist, neoconservative-influenced reactions to innocuous and falsely reported public events.

One of the FBI’s triggers was a controversy that erupted in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. At the time, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin claimed that the Trump campaign had removed an amendment from the party’s platform that called for arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas region. In reality, the RNC platform committee had merely rejected a proposal to endorse providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. The Republicans’ final platform text instead called for “increasing sanctions” on Russia and “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine,” which could easily have included weapons. The RNC platform was also far more hawkish than the Democrats’ platform that same summer, in line with the policies of President Obama, who had refused to send the same weaponry to Ukraine.

All of this was known at the time. Yet nearly one year later, the FBI decided that the issue flagged by Rogin’s exaggerated opinion column was grounds to suspect that Trump was working for Russia. According to the newly released, fully-declassified “Electronic Communication” that opened the probe, the FBI noted with alarm that “this platform change would be favorable to Russian interests” and that a Trump foreign policy advisor, JD Gordon, publicly admitted “that he pushed the platform change to align with Trump’s views.” Even assuming that a meaningless platform change would somehow help “Russian interests,” the FBI had decided that Trump’s purported “views” – whether the bureau had accurately described them or not – were sufficient grounds to investigate him as an agent of Moscow.

The document only underscores that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was influenced by Cold War views and the conspiracy theories of an illicit Trump-Russia connection promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and its media allies.

Back in July 2016, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook declared that Trump had personally “changed the platform” to make it “more pro-Russian.” That same week, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, cited the RNC story as among the reasons to conclude that Trump had chosen to “unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” In his Clinton-funded fictional “dossier,” former UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote that the Trump camp “had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” in exchange for Russia’s election help. After Trump took office, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow declared that the dossier’s allegation of “essentially a quid pro quo between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign” over the platform change was the “latest” of Steele’s claims that “falls into place.”

In this neo-McCarthyite climate, it became an article of faith not only that Trump’s presidency was the product of a conspiracy with Moscow, but that the president himself was vulnerable to Russian financial leverage and outright blackmail. The FBI’s newly declassified document indicates that the bureau took its cues from this prevailing supposition as well. “Open source information indicates that President Trump has had longstanding business and real estate ties in Russia and former Soviet states, stemming from the late 1980s,” the document states. Yet the only concrete example of this is a widely circulated 2008 quote attributed to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who “claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets.” Trump Jr. was celebrating the fact that wealthy Russians were buying up Trump-branded foreign luxury properties, unaware of the possibility that this would one day be seen as grounds to investigate his father for taking orders from Vladimir Putin.

The FBI’s decision to investigate Trump over the meaningless Ukraine weaponry-related platform change became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upon taking office, neoconservatives in Trump’s cabinet and on Capitol Hill exploited the allegations that he was a Russian asset to convince him to authorize arming Ukraine in ways that Obama had refused, out of fears of fueling an escalation. When Trump briefly paused one such weapons shipment in 2019 while pressuring Ukraine to assist with his Russiagate-fueled political vendettas, House Democrats impeached him. Trump’s decision to arm Ukraine, along with the impeachment controversy, helped sabotage the Minsk peace accords, the internationally endorsed pact for ending the Donbas civil war. Ukraine’s refusal to implement Minsk, with U.S. encouragement, ultimately helped trigger Russia’s February 2022 invasion. (The full story is told in my forthcoming book, “Their Blood, Our Bullets.”)

The FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Trump followed an earlier investigation of his campaign members, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was opened the previous July. Previous declassifications show that this probe was just as baseless. The FBI acted on hearsay that a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had made a “suggested ... suggestion” of possible, unspecified Russian help to the campaign. Yet the FBI deemed this vague piece of gossip sufficient to launch arguably the most consequential national security investigation in U.S. history.

Both investigations were folded into the inquiry led by Robert Mueller, who was appointed just one day after the FBI began portraying Trump internally as a possible Russian agent or conspirator. Mueller’s final report “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The new declassification comes one year after the public also belatedly learned that Mueller and U.S. intelligence leaders concealed doubts at the highest level about Russiagate’s core allegation: that Moscow interfered in the election to help Trump defeat Clinton. A previously unpublished Intelligence Community Assessment, circulated within the government on September 12, 2016, stated that the FBI and the National Security Agency had “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails. Emails also showed that the head of the NSA, Mike Rogers, complained that his analysts were denied access to the underlying intelligence used to make the attribution to Russia. Rather than address Rogers’ concerns, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, denied his request and told him to acquiesce. “It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page ... in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it,’” Clapper wrote. “... This is one project that has to be a team sport.”

After yet another nine-year delay, the public has learned more details of how top intelligence officials stuck to their deception in a sprawling, and still unraveling, effort to tie Trump to Russia.

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Eulogies for political figures are prone to embellishment, but President Trump’s speech at the funeral for the late Senator Lindsey Graham offered one moment of candor. “He was extremely hawkish,” Trump said. “I can tell you, he never saw a war that he didn’t like.”

With both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in attendance, Graham’s memorial service showcased how his two favorite wars are increasingly converging.

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